Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) Read Online Free PDF

dark, and that’s when I saw
my
person on the path.
    He was right at the point where the track leaves Broceliande, where the tangle of rose-briar and hawthorn thins, that marshy area, with the aspens and broken oaks … He was standing there, holding a horse by the reins. Then he stepped forward, and I could see that the horse was heavily packed and that the man, who was young and lightly bearded, had some strange bagpipes over his shoulder. There was a stringed instrument on the side of the packhorse, a piece of curved and decorated wood and a small soundbox. I didn’t recognise it, and I never heard it played, but that this ghost, this shimmering man, was a musician was all that I could think of.
    He drew back into the woods as you and Sebastian came running back to the farmhouse. He watched you carefully, and you didn’t see him. That’s odd, isn’t it? Usually the ghosts are unaware of us.
    When you’d gone, he led the horse forward up the path, hurrying slightly, although he was moving slowly, like a slowed film, but the haste was conveyed clearly. He knew I was behind him, following. I had never seen anything like it. I was enchanted. The glimmer, likefairy glamour, flowed from his edges. It filled the night air, and I tried to touch it, but felt nothing.
    I caught up with him. I felt so alive, suddenly I forgot about my eyes, which were still hurting from the way I’d slashed the skin. I can recognise now that I was aroused, that my body was aroused by imagination, by the experience of seeing a troubadour, a ghostly one, but a sort of dream recreated on that autumn night. I was thrilled by the encounter, and desperately wanted to hear him sing. So I entered him, and copied Sebastian, turning and swirling inside the dewy ghost.
    There was nothing but rage. It was terrifying. I was caught in a whirlpool of fear, of anger. The man was escaping. He was frightened of something, and secretive. The rage in him seemed to crush me. Every squirt of blood in his veins was the rushing of a waterfall; his heart was thundering. I was deafened by this man’s retreat from some terrible encounter, or so it felt. I was strangling, gasping for breath, turning desperately to find fresh air as he carried me with him, up to the hill. It was like being buried alive.
    Then, just at the last, just as I thought I was going to die, I heard the sound of pipes. He wasn’t playing them, he was
remembering
them. He was singing to himself in his own language, remembering the skirling notes of the pipes he carried, and I shared that thought, that moment of internal music. I touched an ancient music. I was treated to such an old song, and a song filled with such despair …
    I became haunted by that music, just as Sebastian had been haunted by his own encounter. I couldn’t sing it. Itmade no sense. It made sense only in my head; I could jig to it, I could twirl to it, but it was inexpressible, except in dreams.
    How old was I? I can’t remember, now. Fifteen, maybe. I spent the holiday weeks of the next two years among the stones at Carnac, hating the tourists, the wretched families who came to picnic, to photograph, but not to listen. I was listening for the dreamsongs of that time, for the old tunes, for some clue to the magic that was now in me. But I realised that even that ancient earth wasn’t old enough. To articulate the music that flowed inside me not so much like blood, more like … like a benign but omnipresent parasitic worm, invading my spaces, pulling back when it hurt me, growing inside me but as I say,
inexpressible
, because it was pure feeling, eroding me, fighting me, but carefully … to find out how to exorcise that music, to get rid of the ghost that something in Broceliande had driven into me, I had to go further back.
    Which is why I went to Australia, to the place of songlines, and songtrails, and a way of singing that you would never understand, because it isn’t singing at all, nor singing up the world of rocks